Meditations 4 Misfits

May the fire produce beauty in your life. Blessings, Fred

Heraclitus the Obscure wrote, “I searched for myself.” May you be as successful as Waldo today!

Blessings, Fred

My book makes a great Christmas present … particularly for those folks who annoy you!

Blessings, Fred

What the Dying Have Taught Me about Living: The Awful Amazing Grace of God: Fred Grewe: 9780829820034: Amazon.com: Books

I recently visited with a hospice patient who shared with me one of the best ideas I’ve heard yet on how to cope with the COVID19 housebound blues.

He’s a really likeable guy who’s now confined to a wheelchair and has been for a while. To help him deal with his loss of freedom, his family came up with the idea of going on virtual tours together. Here’s how it works. Once a week he tells them about a place he’s always wanted to visit but now can’t. For example, the first trip they took together was motorcycle ride through Australia. His partner researched various Australian foods and made several recipes that looked and smelled like fun. Then he and his partner loaded some YouTube videos of Australian motorcycle rides and watched them together while they ate. The house was filled with the aromas of Down Under and they had a great time. Each week they research a new virtual tour. Once and awhile their daughter and her partner join in as well.

Not only has this helped ease my friend’s loss of autonomy, but its also brought the whole family closer together. I’m sure they’re crafting memories that’ll bring peaceful comfort after my friend has died.

This is such a great idea I’ve talked with Nancy about us doing it as well. While I’m not on hospice, COVID19 has sure cut down on my freedom. My first stop will be New Zealand to watch an All Blacks match! Where would you like to go?

I know, it’s been a while.

A lot has happened in the past few weeks. We’ve safely moved into our condo in Ashland, and once again have internet access. That’s why I was off the grid while we got things set up.

Although much smaller than our former home, this is a lovely space. The views are spectacular. Morning sun melting the night’s fog on the Siskiyou mountains is a soul nurturing experience. Truth be told though it feels like living in an Airbnb. While it technically is our place and we’re buying the furnishings that are filling it up, it really isn’t our “stuff.” There’s no emotional connection or history to the items now dwelling in our new home. Nancy didn’t weave it, Aunt Rina didn’t give it to us as a wedding gift, we didn’t pick it up on our honeymoon to the coast. They’re nice items to be sure – functional, just not ours. Living here feels a lot like being out of place. It’s just not home.

The other morning while talking with Frank my spiritual director, he asked me to describe how my soul felt about it all and I said it feels like I’m a newborn. The womb that had nurtured my soul for the past number of years, particularly my library, is gone. My sanctuary of a home office has burned and is forever gone. I have been “untimely ripped” from that safe place where I could recharge when life had depleted me. Just as a newborn is unceremonially squished through a dark uterine canal and greeted into a new existence by a hard smack on the ass, so too has the Almeda wildfire thrust me from the safety and solace of my soul’s sanctuary. And just like a newborn, I’m fussy and crying like hell.

It’s not just the loss of the big things, the enormity of it all, but it’s also the memory of the little personal items that get to you. Like Yuri’s shadow box. On my first preaching trip to Russia back in the early 90’s Yuri was my translator in Nizhny Novgorod. We became fast friends. One day as we were walking through town, I noticed a street vendor selling a beautiful little shadow box for about $15. I really wanted it but decided against buying it thinking it would just break on my return trip home. Several years later, Yuri emigrated to the West and was able to bring one suitcase of belongings with him. He had bought that shadow box and brought it to me on a visit as a gift. So while on the insurance inventory sheet I mark it down as a $15 item, to me it is irreplaceable. I cry just thinking about it. It reminds me of Yuri and our friendship. How do you put a number on that? And our home was filled with innumerable such items for both Nancy and me. Now all forever gone.

So, like a newborn I’m trying to adapt to my new surroundings. Trying to discover a new way of being in the world without my old comforts. It is hard, but it’s not all bleak and dreary. Actually, there are times I find it quite hopeful. Just as a newborn has a whole new life ahead, so do I. What new adventures await? Like it or not, it’s time to rebuild. And the comforting thing is that I’m not alone. The One who created me also travels this way with me. While the fire has taken much, it has not been able to erase the Creator’s words etched into my soul, “Never will I leave you nor forsake you.”

BTW, here’s a link to a Washington Post video documenting the Almeda wildfire that took our home. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/20/oregon-almeda-fire/?arc404=true

Here’s the latest dispatch from the dislocated. Nancy and Elijah have both safely returned from their wanderings. Nancy from her father’s 90^th birthday celebration in Massachusetts, and Elijah from his walk-about (he made it all the way east to Pittsburgh) – and we have secured permanent housing. Our home burned on September 8^th in the Almeda Fire, and PEMCO our insurance company moved heaven and earth to give us a speedy dwelling settlement enabling our future move into a small but lovely condo in Ashland. Words can’t adequately communicate what an emotional relief it is to have them home and to have found a place to live.

Had a chance to just get quiet and breathe this morning, trying to absorb all that has occurred in my life over the past four weeks.

Found myself wrestling with a jumble of emotions. First there is deep gratitude for Larry the incredibly kind insurance guy from PEMCO, Steve the estimator from Belfor Construction, and all those who made our more-than-speedy settlement possible. There is also overwhelming and humbling gratefulness for the outpouring of money, good wishes, notes, prayers, and chants from so many family and friends. The response from folks I haven’t seen in as much as 50 years has been unfathomable. For one prickly grumpy old man, I sure have accumulated some remarkable companions along the way. It is simply beyond understanding.

Alongside with this gushing of immense gratitude there was also bewilderment and deep sadness. I mean, why me? How can I be so fortunate while so many of my neighbors, documented and un, are still going through so much pain, uncertainty, and loss? Truth be told, it just breaks my heart.

If I’ve learned anything through this ordeal, it is to find a way of becoming part of a solution to these local disparities while resisting the divisive name-calling and labeling that produces only more pain and dislocation.

And finally, there was my emotional response to God. Through it all, the fires, the sirens, the numerous re-locations, the unbreathable smoke-filled air, the grief of loss, the uncertainty of the future – there was always a wordless awareness of being held by our Sacred Other. Never abandoned. Never alone. I experienced at the raw reptilian fear level what Erik Kolbell writes, “Life is arbitrary, God is not.”

And so, I’m left bewildered, incredibly grateful, broken-hearted, safe, and loved.  As I say, it’s a jumble. Maybe that’s the opportunity life affords? We’re given good and bad and we’re asked to make the best of it for ourselves and the others we share life with? We’re all in this ambivalent word together. We truly need each other. Nothing like a good crisis of biblical proportions to bring this truth home.

In closing, a favorite line from Hafiz, the Sufi poet, has come to surface from my soul’s musings.

“My love for God is such that I could dance with Him (or Her) tonight without you,

but I would rather have you here.”

The good news is I think I’ve secured a beautiful place for Nancy, Shanti, and I to live long term. Will find out for sure later this week when we learn what insurance will pay us.

The bad news is that I continue to deeply mourn what we’ve lost. You’ll probably think me silly, but what I really miss most are my books. They weren’t just pages glued and bound – they were intimate friends. Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, Brennan Manning, Pema Chodron, Abraham Heschel, Thich Nhat Hanh, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Joan Chittister, Parker Palmer, Lao Tzu, Red Pine, Hafiz, Rumi, Irvin Yalom, Robert Farrar Capon, Thomas Moore, John O’Donoue, and a host of others – men and women I’ve never met, yet all who have profoundly contributed to the shaping and crafting of my soul.

I know, the books can be replaced. But it’s not really the books, it’s my highlighting, underlining, and marking questions on their pages that I mourn. They were my refuge when life got the better of me and I lost my way. They called me back to my Center. I feel like I’ve lost my mooring. My recorded dialogue and arguments with these beautiful wisdom teachers is gone forever, burned to ash.

So staying here at the Millers, I have access to my friend Randy’s library. He has a different set of spiritual guides, ones with whom I’m not so familiar. I’m currently reading one his books called “What Jesus Meant” which is Erik Kolbell’s take on the Beatitudes.

I’m captivated by Kolbell’s insights into the second Beatitude, “Blessed are those who mourn …” He writes, “Our lives are lived in a series of lives and deaths, comings and goings, gains and losses.” He unpacks this beautiful line with a rich passage on childbirth. Just as a child is pushed from the safety and security of her mother’s womb into the uncertainty of life as we know it, she releases the first primal wail of surrender to the impermanence of our existence. This loss of what we know to be security is followed by an endless series of losses – a favorite blanket, toys, leaving home for school, friends made at school, the insecurity of finding work, a life partner, aging and the loss of mobility, until the final loss of life itself. We mourn them all.

He suggests that while, “Life is arbitrary, God is not … God does not engineer suffering and loss but rather calls us to redeem it, to die into something.”  Kolbell’s point is that all these losses do cause pain as we are ripped from whatever has helped us feel safe and secure, but they are also doorways into the Great Next. Such is the human condition.

Maybe all of these life mournings are preparation for the Great Morning we call Death?

Maybe my mourning over lost books isn’t really bad news after all?

Yesterday was an odd day. The air was cool, the skies were blue and clear. You’d never know the previous week we were living in Dante’s Inferno.

Nancy left early for a flight to Massachusetts, a long-planned trip for her father’s 90^th birthday. My son Elijah has been on a Walk-About for the past week. After his mother’s death, and our total loss due to the southern Oregon fires, he just needed to get away from the smoke and process his own grief. He’s been driving east for over a week now. And our temporary hosts, the Millers, left yesterday as well for a planned silent retreat in Washington. So I was home alone with Shanti the wonder dog.

Now normally, I love being alone. All my life I have sought out silence and solitude. As a Five on the enneagram, and an off-the-chart introvert, silence has always been one of my dearest friends. Until yesterday.

After more than ten frantic days occupied by evacuations, the search for temporary housing, and initiating the mountain of minutia with insurance and what-not that a disaster of biblical proportions requires, I was left home alone with really nothing to do. And it as disquieting.

With no immediate crises demanding my attention, the repressed emotions of the past two weeks were free to reach up from my bowels and grab my heart. In the long hours of quiet, images flooded my mind and remembrances of what we have lost overwhelmed me. It was unusually difficult. Even my dear friend, Silence, had turned on me as well. Nowhere to hide.

I experienced in a very real way what I have shared with countless survivors of a loved one on hospice care over the years: after spending so much time care giving for your loved one, lots of free time will not be easy. A truth I really didn’t grasp until yesterday.

Yesterday, silence was not my friend.